


BREATH OF LIFE

by MagicalBeanie



Category: DCU (Comics), Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics)
Genre: Gen, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-16 16:15:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29085222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagicalBeanie/pseuds/MagicalBeanie
Summary: He still remembered the surreal feeling and the faraway look in his eyes when you’d told him that you’d fallen in love with the soul that was housed in his body, and that what he looked like on the outside had only been the gateway to what lay inside.
Relationships: Jason Todd/Reader, Jason Todd/You
Kudos: 24





	BREATH OF LIFE

He still remembers the feeling.

How visceral it was; how, ironically, it had felt like dying. That first breath he took when the Lazarus pit revived him. How the glow of the green pit surrounded him.

The fire in his lungs, the feeling of cold flame on his skin and in his eyes.

He also remembered how nothing had been gentle ever since. He was revived in all the physical ways that mattered, and yet he didn’t feel alive.

He had seen the light of day, and yet that gift had been given to him in the darkest of ways and on the darkest of nights. So much darkness had surrounded him, with the only light available a soulless, immortal pit.

It had seemed that whatever force of nature he had defied by leaving the grave was intent on making its displeasure quite clear, at least that was what he told himself.

There had been so much noise in his head, so much anger, so much trauma. Just so much of everything.

He had spent a long time dealing with the alien familiarity of his own face, his body, his voice and all the things that were given to him in his second unintentional attempt at life in a world that had moved on without him, that he could never fully be part of.

His body might have forgotten the nightmares it had endured, but his mind did not.

He was plagued by visions of what was the worst day of his life, and also his last. The most familiar feeling being that of the realisation that he was going to die.

Looking at the time bomb and counting down the seconds his heart had left to beat. The feeling of regret, of sadness, of betrayal.

His mind still remembered the feeling of cold floors and the hard cold metal, taking away his strength with every strike against his bones.

Sometimes he could feel the echoes of the pain on his skin.

It seemed, in his new life, he was forever plagued by the beginning and the end of his old one.

He often struggled with his place in the world.

One of the many things he often wrestled with was whether he was a good person or not, whether he deserved to be alive or not, whether he deserved to be loved or not.

The constant conflict of whether his place was with the devil or the angel, needled at him the same way tides in the ocean would pull back and forth, never leaving, but never staying either.

The blood he had on his hands, however tainted it had been, was a stain be couldn’t remove from the sins of his soul, and it haunted him.

The silence of the room around him along with the noise in his mind after he woke from nightmares that narrated his history in all horrific ways that would linger in his subconscious would be the worst part of waking up.

The silence was so loud he could hear the irregular beat of his heart, almost mocking him after he would be forced to relive his death over and over again in his mind, with the palpable silence making his loneliness much more tangible in those moments.

Then he met you. 

An unforeseen disruption in the solitary, undeviating routine that was his life. 

You seemed to have come from out of nowhere and into his life with a force unknown to him. You had seen past what was in front of you, and had known the man underneath the carefully crafted mask. 

Your touch had scared him, at first.

It was unusually gentle. The care and patience that came with your touch was a different kind of frightening for him, at least in the beginning.

He was unsettled by the lack of a threat, the lack of need to defend himself.

Jason lived with his guard up, so when you approached with nothing but love he didn’t know how to defend himself, not knowing how to process that he didn’t have to.

He still remembered the surreal feeling and the faraway look in his eyes when you’d told him that you’d fallen in love with the soul that was housed in his body, and that what he looked like on the outside had only been the gateway to what lay inside.

Once he had learned to let your warmth seep into his skin and run through his veins, it was a feeling he craved more than he would like to admit.

You had stripped him naked in the most intimate way, something he had been completely unprepared for: someone seeing his naked soul and clothing it with nothing but endless love and tenderness.

To treat his heart like the delicate yet fractured ornament it was. To understand his mind and his actions without any long explanations. It had unsettled him at first, being seen and understood so effortlessly.

You had earned the right to touch him, to be gentle with him.

Your touch was addictive in every way.

The feather light feeling of your hand on his face when he woke up, the comfort you brought him on particularly hard days when his mind and his work would weigh heavily on him.

The possessive grip you had on him when he would entangle your body with his and have you moan and whisper his name like it was the only word you knew.

To have his name stained on your lips, while his hands would trail blazing patterns on your skin and set your soul on fire.

He was as familiar with your skin as he was with his own, never lost but always wandering, finding new places to explore, to taste and to leave his mark.

Jason truly believed himself to be a lost soul, given that he had been forced to relinquish its possession and yet it had been thrust back into his hands without his permission, but he felt a certain reassurance when he shared it with you.

He knew wouldn’t be as tempted to dance with the devil as he had been before and lose himself in the lust of the darkness, because you were there to resuscitate his soul and save him from the creeping tendrils of his darkest thoughts on his darkest nights.

He knew he wasn’t perfect.

Jason was rough around the edges with an inherent softness he sometimes fought against and it had been the cause of many arguments between the two of you.

He was still mystified as to how you remained by his side despite having known him at his worst, but he finally had a taste of what the heavens he might never get to see felt like, and he was determined to hold on to the feeling as long as you would let him.

You had come with a light that was full of life, revived him in the most intimate of ways, and had dared him to look past the fog of his present and look towards the hope of a future.

A future that didn’t include the crippling solitude he’d felt before, a future with the feeling of belonging he so desperately sought.

A beginning and an ending, something he never thought about before he met you.

Jason could finally breathe like he was alive, and not just existing.

The only time he had taken a breath and it had felt like living, was when he looked at you.


End file.
